Academic literature and frameworks

Academic literature and frameworks as a source of guidance

The intrinsic worth of gaming as a pedagogical tool has in recent years come under considerable scrutiny.  This niche study area is part of a paradigm shift of social, cultural and economic aspects of humanity’s daily life that has accompanied a recent global surge in new technologies.  Governments and individuals, seeking to ride this wave to greater prosperity, have called on educational institutions, teachers and academics to provide clear guidance in this brave new digital world (Australian Government, n.d.).   Thus a whole academic publishing industry has been conceived by and grown around this perceived need to document, define and evaluate the use of technologies like gaming in the classroom.  Publications like The Radical Teacher, The British Journal of Educational Technology, Journal of Online Learning and Teaching and the International Journal of Learning and New Media each have presented a series of articles from leading academics on these issues.  Each seeks to propose how technology may best be exploited in schools to raise the learning outcomes of students or to evaluate current practice.   Educators, considering potential future social, economic, and cultural fallouts, need a critical framework to help choose the right direction to lead their students through this quagmire of claim and counterclaim.  Until the value and effectiveness of learning supported by these technologies can be readily verified, schools and educators may be resistant to the idea of an early adoption and integration of gaming in the classroom.  Bearing in mind existing cultural perceptions of gaming as a low literacy activity, often engaged with by students for out-of school entertainment purposes, there exists a need for a body of research to affirm the positive use of this technology in the classroom  (Neuman & Celana, 2006; OECD, 2009).

South Koreans as early adopters of the infrastructure

 required for mass online gaming: Cultural affect

My position in this ideological tug of war

As a postgraduate student and teacher I am sometimes wary of the specialist nature of these publications, as it is in the career interests of their author’s to convince their readers of the relevance or effect size of using one technology over another.  This leads me to the subject of today’s post, a 2009 offering from Michigan State University academics Foster and Mishra.   Titled Games, claims, genres, and learning, it is the second chapter of the Handbook of research on effective electronic gaming in education.  As its’ naming suggests, it firstly provides an overview of the negative and positive claims previously levelled at gaming as a pedagogic device.  Foster and Mishra (2009) then proceed to suggest a new theoretical framework that may be used to address the deficits they have identified in the current scholarship that surround the use of gaming in education.  As these stated aims may provide assistance in my developing greater clarity on these issues, I have chosen to present a summary of the major concepts discussed in this text. 

Games, claims, genres, and learning (Foster & Mishra, 2009)

Foster and Mishra’s literature review is framed by a categorization scheme that divides the range of claims made for games into the physiological and psychological (see Figure 1).  In their assessment of the methodologies used to generate this body of literature they identified three critical issues.  Firstly they concluded that to draw accurate judgements with high external validity from this academic field, there were an insufficient number of authentic, situated research studies on the effects of gaming on learning outcomes.  Secondly, they identified a propensity among researcher to be insensitive to the different pedagogical affordances of specific game genres.   Finally Foster and Mishra criticized the lack of emphasis placed on the acquisition of disciplinary knowledge as a prerequisite of using gaming platforms designed to improve automaticity in subject area content knowledge or problem solving.  If I was to link this argument back to my previous post on Intrepica, I would conclude that children who have not adequately mastered competencies in oral language, would find this site's literacy activities frustrating (Ellis, 2005).  Thus, rather than leading to a rise in motivation, this site may have the opposite affect for some students.  This conclusion is in line with Foster and Mishra’s later argument that the value of electronic games lies not in their mode or mandatory presence in the curriculum, but rather in how these games reflect and support the pedagogical strategies that allow for learning.   In defining the nature of this learning the teacher needs to first examine what skills and content that his or her students need to master in this disciplinary area.  Once this is defined, the actual context and social dynamics within the class need to be considered relative to the potential responses of these students to this technology.  According to this literature review, both the proponents and opponents of gaming agreed that it had a marked effect on student learning.  What seemed less certain was whether this effect was a positive or negative one.

(Foster & Mishra, 2009)

Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPCK) framework

The chief argument that Foster and Mishra's (2009) chapter presented that I found particularly relevant to my own prior teaching experiences, was the idea that 'Gaming' was not a monolithic entity.  Rather, in this analysis there were 10 main genres of games examined, including: platform games, sports, adventure, parlor, rhythm/ dance, strategy, simulation, role-playing, fighting and action/ shooter.  As one might imagine the content, skills and cultural capital embedded in each of these gaming types can differ markedly.  It is thus not erroneous to suggest that the potential effect on the learning experience may also be varied.  So to integrate this technology in the classroom the TPCK framework proposed may help teachers to identify how game design impacts on student learning.  The interactions between technology (T), pedagogy (P), content (C) and the disciplinary specific knowledge structures (K), provides a dynamic critical framework to evaluate the implementation of a game in a specific context (See Figure 2). It gives a conceptual model for educators to explain and justify their reasons for incorporating particular games into their subject curriculum.

(Foster & Mishra, 2009)

References: 

AlJazeeraEnglish (2010). S Korean young caught up in web gaming addiction [Video file].  Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70gvUAtvltk

Australian Government.  (n.d.) Digital Education Revolution.  Retrieved October 18, 2011 from http://www.deewr.gov.au/Schooling/DigitalEducationRevolution/Pages/default.aspx

Ellis, L.A. (2005). Balancing approaches : Revisiting the educational psychology research on teaching students with learning difficulties.  (Research paper published by the Australian Educational Review). Retrieved from http://research.acer.edu.au/aer/6

Foster, A. N., & Mishra, P. (2009). Games, claims, genres, and learning.  In R. E. Ferdig (Ed.), Handbook of research on discrete event simulation environments: Technologies and applications [IGI Global edition] (pp.33-50). doi: 10.4018/978-1-59904-808-6.ch002

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD]. (2009). Creating effective teaching and learning environments: First results from TALIS.  OECD Publishing.  Retrieved online from www.oecd.org/dataoecd/46/17/43044074.pdf

Neuman, S.B., & Celana, D. (2006). The knowledge gap: Implications of leveling the playing field for low-income and middle-income children. Reading Research Quarterly, 41( 2), 176-201